


The Mystery Which Binds Me Still

by daylighthour



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Backstory, Brief suicidal thoughts, Episode 1, Gen, Lonely!Victor, Mentions of Anxiety, Missing Scene, No Dialogue, Title from Edgar Allen Poe’s poem Alone, mentions of depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-07
Updated: 2019-08-07
Packaged: 2020-08-12 04:14:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20155480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daylighthour/pseuds/daylighthour
Summary: Just why would a five-time world champion drop everything to start a new life with someone he barely knows? Episode 1 doesn’t really tell us...Or, in which Victor Nikiforov is not as confident and cavalier as he may seem.





	The Mystery Which Binds Me Still

**Author's Note:**

> Please read the tags. This fic explores loneliness and depression. I have drawn on my own experience in the hopes of being as respectful as possible. That being said, check the notes at the end if you want more specific warnings.

It’s only now, after spending the past two days in it, that Victor realizes how sterile his apartment is. Designer curtains flicked back do nothing to warm the cloudy brightness that spills upon the cold tile floor. From his perch, the couch, he can survey the portraits that line the walls, all expensive, none having anything to do with him. The couch itself is leather, fine and soft, but it still smells new even after two years of having it. There is no one but Victor to sit upon it, none but him to wear it in.

Victor clicks his tongue and pats the couch beside his leg, calling Makkachin up to curl beside him. Once upon a time, he forbade her from hopping up on the furniture, worried her nails would scratch the leather, worried her paws would trek in dirt, and what would the guests think of  _ that _ ? But he’s never had a guest to think  _ anything  _ about his apartment, and so up Makkachin climbs. 

It’s barely nine o’clock. Victor should be practicing, but Yakov found him in the rink stalls two days ago, clutching the toilet and dry-heaving, and told him to take a break from skating. Victor had been foolish to go to practice at all that day, when he’d spent the night before awake and scarcely able to breathe, because Yakov always knew when one of his students was off. In his gruff way, he prescribed Victor rest, maybe some soothing tea, because if Yakov always knew when  _ something  _ was off, unless the ailment was physical, he never knew what it was. Victor doesn’t blame him; he can’t. Nor can he attempt to explain to his coach that it’s not his stomach that bothers him most, it’s the fact that he can hardly bring himself to get out of bed to feed his dog, the fact that his skates feel like lead manacles around his ankles, that he thinks of death and panics because he doesn’t want to die, he just wants to live again, but he doesn’t quite know how. 

So Victor accepts the advice, says he must have caught a bug of some sort. Yakov was bred of a different stock, a different time, when axels were doubles and people wrong in the head were sent to institutions. What can Victor expect of him if he hardly knows what’s wrong with him himself?

He can’t say when this all started, this haze, this feeling of moving through jelly that left him more than exhausted even on days when he hadn’t trained. But he knew something was wrong the day he won his fifth Grand Prix gold and felt  _ nothing,  _ no joy, only a sinking terror at the pit of his stomach that he’d have to keep this up, that everyone was expecting him to. He knew something was wrong, because who wins medals and  _ doesn’t want them?  _ But what is he to do? His only friend is Makka, and she listens but does not counsel.

He wonders what having a real friend is like. 

On his lap, his phone vibrates with a text from Yura, and in spite of himself, Victor can’t help but smile. They were practicing now, no doubt, and still the boy would use his break to text him. Yura knows more about many things than he lets on. Victor knows he cares a lot more, too.

_ _ As Victor enters in his passcode, he thinks that maybe this is what having a friend is like. But if it is, it’s only a taste. Yura is a boy still, fifteen, shimmering with promise and golds on the horizon. What does he know of the setting sun, of a twenty-eight-year-old whose whole life has been lived on the ice, who now panics at the thought of what comes next? It would be unfair to trouble him with the worries of a man nearly twice his age.

Still, it is nice to know someone cares.

The message is a link to a Youtube video; Yura’s only description being “check this out”. Victor taps it automatically. It’s an ice skating video, he sees, and he almost closes out of it as his heart begins to race.

But just before he does, the skater pushes off from the boards, and Victor recognizes him. It’s the Japanese skater from the GPF banquet the year before, the one who had been sloppy drunk but had still shown Victor more keen and personal attention than anyone had in a long while. Victor finds he doesn’t even have to search for the man’s name; it comes to his tongue like a cool drink, a breath of summer air.

_ Yuuri Katsuki. _

Victor watches intently now, and the more he watches the more he finds that he can dig up pieces of dim profiles and stats about this Yuuri, he’s heard of him as a skater before, but that is not what holds him spellbound. Yuuri is skating Victor’s skate, his  _ Stammi Vicino,  _ and Victor wonders how many times Yuuri has watched his performance, because the Japanese skater is skating it  _ exactly  _ how Victor did, but better. Victor sees a man from whom  _ nothing  _ is expected, but from whom everything has the potential to be delivered, felt, breathed into being. 

Victor is well aware that skaters watch videos of him, to see the technicality of a step sequence, to analyze his skates as he takes off for a quad flip, but he has never seen anything like  _ this.  _ Yuuri skates like he wants to  _ know  _ Victor, like he is grasping to try to understand  _ him _ by following in his footsteps. Him, Victor. The man who is a skating legend, and not the other way around.

Victor feels his throat clench with emotion, and before he realizes it, he is crying, pouring tears into his hands like raindrops. He thanks Yura for the video, but the words are inadequate, because this video, this  _ Yuuri  _ has brought him feeling and emotion and love when Victor hardly remembered what those felt like anymore.

_ I want you to be my coach.  _ The words strike Victor’s heart, and he wonders how he ever allowed himself to forget them. Yuuri Katsuki asked him to be his coach, requested that of him when most people were too afraid to ask for an autograph,, as though Victor were a shining star who would burn them. But Yuuri…. They’d talked and danced and he’d asked Victor to be his coach just as easily as any friend asked a favor of another.

Perhaps  _ that  _ was what having a friend was like. 

And that is what decides him. Victor sees in Yuuri a chance: a chance at a friend, a chance at change, a chance at living again. He would go to Japan, he would go be something for the man who had asked this of him, because it had been so long since someone had  _ asked  _ Victor to do something and not just expected it of him. He would be a coach and help someone believe in themselves and maybe, just maybe, that belief would rub off on Victor, too.

He books a flight for that night, before he can talk himself out of it. 

When he tells Yakov of his plan, the old man is angry, but Victor brushes it off and tells him it’s a matter of inspiration. But it’s more than that. It’s salvation. It’s the first decision Victor makes for himself in a long, long time, and he feels apprehensive, and overwhelmed, and excited, and maybe a little bit stupid.

He  _ feels.  _

**Author's Note:**

> Victor is suffering from what clearly seems like depression. He never uses this word to describe it, but rather describes his feelings/lack of them.
> 
> When talking about Yakov’s misunderstanding of how he feels, Victor alludes to the stigma surrounding mental illness historically, and makes mention of insane asylums. 
> 
> Victor describes panicking after a brief episode in which he thinks about being dead. He does not express a will to die, nor does he have a plan to commit suicide.


End file.
